Coming Together, Coming Apart: A Memoir of Heartbreak and Promise in Israel »

Daniel Gordis is vice president of the Mandel Foundation–Israel. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including the New York Times, Tikkun, the Forward, and the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of several books, including If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches from an Anxious State.

Prepare to experience a powerful, multilayered true love story like none you have ever read before—the deeply resonant and satisfying memoir of a man struggling to hold his world together as his country is being torn apart.

When Daniel Gordis, his wife, Elisheva, and their three young children abandoned a safe and comfortable home in Los Angeles to move halfway around the world and find a new life in Israel, the future looked bright. It was 1998, Ehud Barak had just been elected prime minister, and peace appeared to be only a few tough negotiations away.

Two years later, hope had turned to terror, as the rattle of machine-gun fire perforated the night and the frightened, exhausted children clung desperately to their stuffed animals in fitful sleep, dreaming perhaps of the quiet, peaceful world they had left behind.

In Coming Together, Coming Apart, Gordis tells a timely, relevant, and deeply personal tale that lays bare the complex problems of the seemingly intractable and often incomprehensible Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reveals how much is at stake, and underscores the toll the struggle takes on every human being it touches.

How do you raise children in a land of suicide bombings and rocket attacks? Can a society preserve its moral principles through five decades of war? With the Intifada raging and America about to invade Iraq, with Saddam Hussein threatening missile attacks on Israel, how can anyone resist the temptation to hate the enemy? Writing with unparalleled sympathy, creativity, and hope, Gordis explores all of these questions and many more through a series of disarmingly simple anecdotes that nonetheless penetrate deeply into the heart of the matter.

In 2005, two disengagements loomed large for Gordis. The first, which grabbed headlines worldwide, was Israel's pullout from the Gaza strip and the eviction of Jewish settlers it could no longer protect. The second separation, occurring at the same time, was a more personal one: his daughter was drafted. With the country divided over the pullout and his own children marching toward a future potentially devoid of peace, Gordis peers deeply into the soul of a country where the more people appear bound together, the more completely they're torn apart.

Prologue.

A HAVEN, A BATTLEGROUND.

What Did You Learn in School Today?

I Wonder If This Is What Peace Is Like?

On Reentries.

The Masks We Wear.

No Other Land.

It’s All about Questions.

AN ENDING, A BEGINNING.

Nine Things Worth Remembering.

When Magical Thinking Will Not Suffice.

A Place Where Life Goes through You.

The Bearable Lightness of Peace.

Shattered.

In That Split Second.

What’s a Disengagement?

LOST, AND FOUND.

Plus Ça Change, N’est-Ce Pas?

Difficult Choices, Irreparable Losses.

Coming Home.

A Plane, A Bus, and a Trial.

The Morning After.

Unacceptable. Unjust.

Tell Shlomo.

An Ode to Ambivalence.

Three Girls, Three Graves, One Torah.

WOUNDED, AND HEALING.

Born Again.

And the Land Was Tranquil.

What Divides Us.

To Hell in a Handbasket.

Even the Victors Ought to Mourn.

A Reprieve.

A Talmudic Warning.

This Is Why We’re Here.

A WAGER, AND A PRAYER.

Lucky, Don’t You Think?

Yeah, Right.

The Bird’s Nest in Shul.

A Rock and a Hard Place.

Exodus(es), Redux.

Child’s Play.

Good, As Good As Can Be.

Coming Attractions?

One Ribbon Has to Go.

Reengagement.

There Are No Words.

Acknowledgments.

Credits.